The product of Principato’s residency with the National Park Service on the titular island, forthcoming album On Fire Island offers another vivid example of this style. Layers of field recordings anchor the sound within the locale, with particular attention paid to the elemental forces of wind and waves which have long shaped the environment. But ever perceptive to the subtleties of a place, the Saapato sound captures the full spectrum of moods present within such phenomena. And, together with conscientious ambient arrangements, manages to evoke both the raw power and tender beauty of which such forces are capable.

But there’s another, deeper duality at the heart of On Fire Island. One perhaps inherent within any piece of art which attempts to explore the natural world in the contemporary age. Because while the release is an overt celebration of the landscape and the life which inhabits it, there is a sense of lamentation to the sound too. As though, in the years we are living through, to recognise the beauty of any environment is to mourn its ongoing and escalating loss. To understand how humanity is slowly decimating everything it should hold dear.

Thus for all of its meditative birdsong and amphibian calls, tracks like lead single ‘Morning Swale Song’ are underpinned by a certain urgency. A slow-moving feeling which creeps up from inside the spacious arrangements, something bound up within both melancholy and joy. A sensation subtle until the moment it suddenly isn’t, and you realise that we are responsible for much of the fragility around us. That we must act if we wish to preserve all this intricate detail, this beauty, this life.

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But, despite being made with the same ethos and general techniques, the new record offers something of a change of focus. The thick and verdant soundscapes remain, as do Principato’s use of manipulated field recordings and preoccupation with the intersection of place and memory, but the locations called forth are more nebulous. Somewhere Else “is a little different in that the space is not as physical as previous releases,” as we described in our preview of the title track, “though no less real and familiar.”

This style is typified by ‘Fool’s Empyrean’, a slow-moving almost ten-minute piece which rises from the grounded ribbiting of frogs towards an almost transcendental bed of sound. Though as the song unfurls and the environmental elements reappear, any sense of linear progression is diminished. Instead, as the title might suggest, the earthly and the cosmic appear in tandem, which in turn greys the distinction between the past and the present, the real and the imaginary, the familiar and the foreign. As Principato describes:

“[This] is a song that seeks to depict a series of intangible yet intimately personal psychic spaces that we all have inside our heads; foggy rooms from our childhoods, familiar smells, misrememberings, dreams, seasons, and routines all blurring together to become our own continuous mental perception of ‘now’.”

The strange environment which emerges is best described by the album’s title. Somewhere else is an assumedly real place, though one whose only certain feature is that of not being here. A place potentially recognisable but foreign by definition, forever straddling the line between expectation and experience. Somewhere, as ‘This Place Ever Changing’ suggests, which can never be nailed down in the world. No matter where you find yourself wandering, there will always be somewhere else.

Somewhere Else is out now. Get it digitally from the Saapato Bandcamp page, or grab a cassette tape from Aural Canyon.

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‘Berlin’, the second single from Brooklyn-based artist AUDG on Paper Moon Records, is a song which exists in the gap in every relationship between perception and reality. With a guest appearance from Molly Albert, the track evokes the particular loneliness of realising another person is not the one you have conjured in your head. Morose and vulnerable indie pop, searching for a way forward when the trap door has opened beneath your feet.

‘Berlin’ is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Elora – Hazard Lights

‘Hazard Lights’ is the latest single from Brooklyn singer-songwriter Elora. What label Paper Moon Records call “a living breathing manifestation of reclaiming control and jumpstarting a new perspective,” the song draws on the styles of 70s pop and contemporary acts like Weyes Blood to create a buoyant sound at once fresh and timeless. “It takes strength to know when you’re down, to grab the wheel and pull yourself out,” as Elora says, and as the track builds into its sunny swagger, that’s exactly the impression it sets.

‘Hazard Lights’ is out now via Paper Moon Records. Find Elora at all the usual places.

Laura Misch – Light Years

Laura Misch is a multidisciplinary artist and producer based in London. But her new album Sample the Sky exists within the liminal space between the city and the natural world beyond its limits. With a layered sound consisting of saxophone, vocals, field recordings and electronics, Misch probes in this border between the urban and the organic to trace often forgotten connections between humanity and the wider web of existence. Previous single ‘Portals’ did this through the lens of her grandfather’s passing, while new track ‘Light Years’ offers a moodier sound but one no less insistent in the way it suggests an overarching interconnection between all forms of life.

The Planes – First Breath After Mask

Rising from the opening stages of the pandemic but coming to represent a more generalised anxiety and the subsequent efforts of relief, ‘First Breath After Mask’ by The Planes is a song at once depressed and affirming. As though from with its own inertia stirs some last attempt at catharsis. The track is indicative of the outfit’s latest album Dark Matter Recycling Co., out now via Safe Suburban Home Records and Totally Real Records, which offers sounds from across the alt rock spectrum without ever fully letting go of The Planes’ indie pop past.

Saapato – Somewhere Else

The music of Saapato, AKA Philadelphia-based ambient musician Brendan Principato, is always firmly rooted within a specific place. Be it a local wildlife sanctuary or his childhood home, Principato employs what he calls “textural soundscape creation and sound bath performance” to capture his surroundings as sound. Latest album Somewhere Else, set for release next month with Aural Canyon Music, is a little different in that the space is not as physical as previous releases, though no less real and familiar. “An exploration of places inside our heads that we lose and find over and over again,” as he explains. “Dynamic, intangible and intimately personal psychic states that are the emotional amalgam of an individual life full of experiences, memories, mis-rememberings, dreams, seasons, surprises, and routines.” Listen to the title track now for a first taste of this liminal space between the inside and outside of our heads.

Salt Cathedral – Complacent

“Don’t stay motionless / by the side of the road, / don’t suspend joy / or love halfheartedly / don’t save yourself / now / or ever.” These words from the poem ‘No Te Salves’ (‘Don’t Save Yourself’) by Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti form the basis of Salt Cathedral’s new single, ‘Complacent’. Hailing from Colombia and now based in Brooklyn, the duo (Juliana Ronderos & Nicolas Losada) won attention in 2020 with album CARISMA, offering a pop style that’s simultaneously sleek, sincere and surreal. The new single builds upon these foundations to form a sound as experimental as it is urgent, leading the listener into the world of Salt Cathedral and demanding they live life to the full. “This is my ode to [Benedetti’s] poem,” as they explain, “my own cry in the battle with mediocrity.”

The track also comes with a video created by Ronderos along with Alex Fischman Cardenas, which you can watch below:

‘Complacent’ is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Tar Of – Ey Vaay

The project of New York‘s Ariyan Basu and Ramin Rahni, Tar Of make art pop of the avant garde variety. Later this month they will release new album Confidence Freaks Me Out,  a 24-track epic that the duo describe as “an exercise in patiently constructed joyous absurdity.” Latest single ‘Ey Vaay’ is a good example, composed of duelling sax and guitar riffs which egg each other on towards a hyperactive rhythm. The only lyric is a Farsi phrase repeated over and over, bending its meaning until it is no longer recognisable and all that remains is the runaway energy accelerating into absurdity.

Wish Queen – Grievances

With album Saturnalia looming on the horizon, Cleveland-based singer/songwriter Grace Sullivan, AKA Wish Queen, has unveiled new single, ‘Grievances’. The track is the ideal entry point of a record which combines alt-pop confidence with confessional intimacy. Wish Queen is something of an alter-ego, allowing Sullivan to transcend the various anxieties and frustrations of contemporary living, and the single serves as a list of grievances from which the project might free her. As though, in offering them up via song, some form of exorcism occurs, and Wish Queen is thus free to soar above the melancholy and the sound.

Wishy – Donut

The new project led by Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites, Wishy are preparing to release their debut EP Paradise via Winspear later this year, and lead single ‘Donut’ serves as their opening salvo. It’s a song which embraces alt rock energy and grungy weight alongside a gauzy shoegaze texture, making for something both propulsive and transportive. Pitchkites’s vocals slice through the haze with real clarity, a thread the listener follows into the sound and holds on to through the enveloping experience.

I’ll leave the keys on the table
Believe me when I say I’m not coming back

Don’t follow me
I’m vibrating ecstasy
Want it to take hold of me
Don’t follow me
I’m fine but
I’m driving on a donut

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I Saw the Egg, the first full-length album by Battle Ave in almost a decade, is inching ever closer. As we described in a preview of lead singles ‘Maya’ and ‘Leo’, the album promises to be a continuation of the signature Battle Ave unpredictability, displaying we we described as “openness to contradiction that allows vastness to sit alongside intimacy, ominousness next to sincerity, and ultimately embraces the beauty and truth of ambiguity.” This week, the band have released the record’s third single, ‘Core’, a big hulking thing that plays like slo-mo shoegaze, lead Jesse Doherty’s comparatively reticent vocals dealing in lines as sparse and opaque as the stories of Diane Williams or Lydia Davis.

I Saw the Egg releases on 1st April on Friends Club Records and Totally Real Records and you can pre-order now from the Battle Ave Bandcamp page.

Deau Eyes – Moscow in the Spring

Taken from Deau Eyes upcoming sophomore record, Legacies, ‘Moscow in the Spring’ gives an insight into the cinematic vision and emotional maturity of Richmond artist Ali Thibodeau. With its speckled synths and sleigh bells, the song conjures an intangible quality, a shimmering sound ghosting around what could otherwise be a classic country tale of longing and regret. Marked by both the dawning excitement of some new frontier, and deepening appreciation of what has been built in the present.

‘Moscow in the Spring‘ is out now and available from Bandcamp. Legacies is out on the 10th June via Subflora.

los nerds- s/t

Super lo-fi but super infectious punk rock from Hermosillo, Mexico. Clocking in at just over seven minutes, los nerds don’t mess around. If you like your catchy melodies buried in fuzz and crackle and general chaos, this is the tape for you. Yelped vocals bounce around with hyperactive intensity, singing about everything from playing Tetris all day to making nuclear bombs in lab class, and even a pretty impressive impression of a car going through the gears on the informatively titled ‘bip bip (“beep beep”).

Jackie West – Amelia

Raised by a musical family in Boston, Jackie West’s musical journey leads from Martha’s Vineyard to Brooklyn and eventually to Paris to record with Lewis Lazar (Oracle Sisters). She returned to New York with a newfound sense of purpose and got to writing the songs that would come to form a self-titled EP on Westernesse. Single ‘Amelia’ is the perfect introduction, a song “about a dear friend who also represents the ‘agape’ love state after you’ve come and gone from each other’s lives many times,” as West puts it. One as rich and heartfelt as that sounds.

Jackie West will be released on Westernesse later this year.

Jana Horn – Jordan

Released last month on No Quarter Records, Optimism by Austin-based songwriter Jana Horn is a lesson in tightly woven and lyrical folk music. Despite the relative minimalism of the arrangements, each track represents its own palm-sized world, none more than the starkly cryptic ‘Jordan’ with its soft-spoken delivery and tacit weight. Check out the animated video by Jaime Zuverza below:

Optimism is out now via No Quarter Records and you can get it from the Jana Horn Bandcamp page.

King of Nowhere – Souls

January saw the return of New York trio King of Nowhere with their self-titled fourth album. Centring on themes of nostalgia and shifting identity, the record is at once vulnerable and empowered, charting the peaks and troughs of coming to terms with yourself in the most honest manner possible. Take the slow, mournful single ‘Souls’ and the way it which it rises out of its downbeat beginnings to realise an affirming climax, complete with vocals from Tetchy‘s Maggie Denning.

Last Quokka – Cue

Carving out a space within Australia‘s rich scene, Whadjuk/Perth punks Last Quokka combine irreverent fun with a fierce antifascist agenda, be it through danceable threats to Nazi scum (“Now it’s time, we’ll tear you down”) or wistful odes to Geoff Gallop (“Yeah look we’re not saying he’s such a great guy / But compared to these other pricks he’s alright”). Ahead of their fifth album on Stock Records and with new members in tow, ‘Cue’ introduces a newly fortified Last Quokka ready for a fresh assault. Slightly more polished perhaps, but certainly no less frenetic, the song dives headfirst into the outback and drags the listener along for the ride.

Mal Devisa – kiid

Having recently signed with Topshelf Records to make her full catalogue available across all streaming services, there’s never been a better time to get familiar with the endlessly inventive work of Mal Devisa. From spoken word poetry through hip hop, pop, folk and jazz, Devisa refuses to settle in any one genre, utilising every tool available to communicate what needs to be heard. 2019’s kiid is a great place to start, a record we previously described as “a personal record [that] plays like condensed version of life, reaching high and falling low, crackling and bursting and simmering under the surface, at times exploding in urgent streams of consciousness as if the words and thoughts can no longer be held in.”

Many Voices Speak – Seat For Sadness

Many Voices Speak returns this spring with Gestures, a brand new record on Strangers Candy. The moniker of Stockholm‘s Matilda Mård, the project has made its name with its luscious dream pop soundscapes, and latest single ‘Seat For Sadness’ shows the new album is no exception. Though within the continued style sits a story of change and transformation, however subtle and modest. “What unites the songs is a need for inner change,” Mård explains, “to handle the things in life that can’t be changed. I’m creating strategies for myself – new ways of thinking, so I can live with certain things.”

No Frills – Copy Cat

In lieu of recording with a full band during a period of lockdown, Daniel Busheikin of Toronto‘s No Frills started their new album Downward Dog in the garage-turned-studio of The Wooden Sky’s Gavin Gardiner, with band members dropping by individually to record their various contributions. Such a process must’ve required a sizeable sense of humour, and lead single ‘Copy Cat’ shows the sardonic blend of pessimism and playfulness that’s a feature of the record. The cartoon video is pretty wild too.

Downward Dog is out on the 1st April and you can pre-order it from the No Frills Bandcamp page.

Ruby Landen – Front Teeth

Writing of Ruby Landen‘s Martyr, well last year, we described how the Brooklyn-based songwriter utilised a classic folk sound to evoke “a kind of duality, between specificity and diffuseness, the wide world and Landen herself.” Back with new single ‘Front Teeth’ via Ruination Record Co., Landen continues this style, the tender acoustic guitar capturing the nostalgic tone of the lyrics, though within the wistful sound lies both cutting commentary and playful humour.

Ryan Dugre – For Clement

Another Ruination record, Look See is a new EP by New York-based multi-instrumentalist Ryan Dugre. Following the ethereal richness of 2021’s Three Rivers, the new release hones Dugre’s sound down to a solo tenor guitar. What results is a streamlined, unadorned exploration of a single instrument, and a lesson in the old adage of less being more. Nowhere is this better highlighted than on the poignant opening track ‘For Clement’, which seems to live far beyond its sub-two-minute runtime.

Saapato – Singing House I & II

Writing about Saapato‘s Bird Sanctuary EP back in 2021, we described how Philadelphia‘s Brendan Principato explores “textural soundscape creation and sound bath performance” to weave songs rooted in his surroundings. Be that composing tracks in the backseat of his car at a New Jersey bird sanctuary, or, as with his new release Singing House I & II, pursuing the full sonic potential of his childhood home. Singing House is a petri dish of improvised ambient performance, field recordings, and loops layered or deconstructed and sent whirring through amplifiers into the air, Principato explains:

From the air they go into an oven, or an attic, or straight into a carpet. A microphone may sit two stories above the origin of the sound, it may sit outside the house, it may sit inside my own mouth as a walk through a hallway. A piano in the garage might be piped through a megaphone inside the refrigerator. A speaker may blast drones from inside a plastic bag submerged in a bathtub. Singing House is without formula.

supernowhere – Basement Window

As if the elastic and endlessly inventive compositions of supernowhere’s 2021 record Gestalt weren’t enough, the trio return this spring with a brand new record on Topshelf Records. Originating from ideas that didn’t make the previous album, the band gave the tracks that extra bit of attention only to see them blossom into Skinless Takes A Flight. For the uninitiated, single ‘Basement Window’ invites the listener into the idiosyncratic and escalating soundscape.

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Following on from the third Saapato record, Becomes Clear, which was released last year on Glass Orchard Records, Principato has returned with the Bird Sanctuary EP. As the title suggests, the release is centred on his experiences birding, the songs composed from the back of his car at the Forsythe Bird Sanctuary in Galloway, New Jersey.

Opener ‘Flock of Snow Geese Taking Flight’ introduces just how effective such a practice can be. There’s a dawning clarity that makes for a striking and moving piece, with a sense of wonder and melancholy intermingling to great effect. The immediacy of its creative process draws the listener into the scene, creating an aural ecosystem that envelops and soothes.

Each track represents a different animal or action, and it becomes a rewarding experience to revisit the sounds and compare how Saapato renders each species in a sonic form. If the snow geese taking flight are given a light, quietly joyous mood, then ‘Ducks’ gives its subject a more grounded one, punctuated with a certain erratic quality as a series of moving parts coalesce into the wider whole of a flock. ‘Swan Through a Telescope’ is far starker and more dramatic, the sound hovering between regal beauty and pervasive loneliness, and offering a tunnel-vision focus that conveys a sense of detachment and distance.

Bird Sanctuary EP is out now and available from the Saapato Bandcamp page.

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